Essays

Multilingual Writing, for Example

An Interview for the Fall Festival on the Theme: "Alter-Englishes"
of the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, Department of English
September 24-25, 1999

Why "for example"?

For example," indicates that I'm not suggesting that other people
write using more than one language. I mean that it’s something I do
(and of course not only I) and that I have good reasons for doing it.
Of course, I don’t always write multilingually. I often write in English
alone, and I also use neologisms that may or may not mean something
in Bantu, Basque, or Burmese Lolo.

Could you tell us what these "good reasons" for writing multilingually
are?

You really don’t need any reason at all to write a poem, unilingually
or multilingually. It’s enough to exist and to know a language and to
want to use it.

But to explain one of my reasons briefly: I was born in France and
grew up in Paris, in Budapest, and in Vienna. Once grown up, I moved
to New York, where I live now. So the order in which I learned languages
was French, Hungarian, German, and English. I often think of them in
alphabetical order as EFGH (English, French, German, Hungarian), though
chronologically it was FHGE. This really doesn’t matter as I am almost
equally at home in all, though lately I’ve come to be more at home in
English because I’ve spent most of my adult life in New York.

Even so, the British-French-Norwegian poet and teacher, Caroline Bergvall
perceived my European background, to which she refers as "foreground,"
when, in her essay on plurilingual writing, "A Blur of Languages?" in
discussing my book Cat Licked the Garlic , she describes elements of
those multilingual poems as "shrapnels of tales from what is both a
European and personal folklore." She adds that "the relays and transmutations
which make out a lot of the humour and absurdist slant of Tardos’ piece[s]
can be seen to function as the mnemotechnical notations or inscriptions
of a post-babelian narrative."

In the preface to my later book Mayg-Shem Fish (Potes & Poets, 1995)
I say that I regard this kind of writing as a "liberation from language-segregation."
Bergvall says that "the very notion of a liberation from
the differentialities of languages could be ambiguous, might imply a
universalist impulse, a longing for a unitary, subliminatory ‘pure language’
(Benjamin) which these unassimilated fragments might as a whole point
to."

Bergvall’s use of the adjective "unassimilated" comes as a surprise
here, since for me the whole point in writing multilingual poems is
precisely to assimilate and to reconcile the hitherto artificially quarantined
language units.

A few years later, in her foreword to Uxudo, she wrote that "cultural
allegiance is not experienced [by Tardos] as necessarily predicated
on linguistic origin. And the sense of linguistic belonging is in turn
neither necessarily nor clearly predicated on the acquisition of one’s
‘first’ language. In fact, the very notion of a ‘first’ language is
up for grabs.

. . . It is often argued that bilingualism itself ought to be considered
a first language.

Since I acquired each of my languages by living in their respective countries, I
inevitably became enmeshed in the human geography of each culture.

Cultural influences accompanying a language have always been an endlessly
fascinating subject to me: how a language can change one’s behavior,
the way one stands and gesticulates, even the way one looks. I noticed,
for example, that when I speak French, the pitch of my voice rises
noticeably higher than, when I speak another language. I might make
entirely different decisions in one language than in another. Perhaps
I am a more generous person in English and a more relaxed or calmer one
in German. Or I may find myself being more irritable in French or more
morose in Hungarian. These are inevitable and probably uncontrollable
cultural-linguistic associations.

How did the different cultures you lived in influence your thinking?

This, of course, applies to everyone. There is no other way. We spend
the rest of our lives forming our own opinions, our own world, making
up our own, personal reality, which we then share with like-minded friends
and acquaintances. But having no other reference point at the outset
than what we are offered by our immediate environment, we really must
be brainwashed, as it were, or we couldn’t function in the society we’re
born into.

Do you feel that writing in more than one language brings you closer
to an "inner truth"?

If my inner truth happens to be multilingually shaped, it would. While
freely mixing the languages I know, I may be getting closer to a hidden
and personal truth, a truth that lies deep and can best be unearthed
by using or inventing this "private language" that is composed not only
of various existing languages, but also of their lookalikes and their
soundalikes. When I say "private language," I don’t mean that it is
entirely incomprehensible to readers who don’t speak these particular
languages. In fact, I’m often surprised what people read into my poems:
meanings I did not knowingly intend. Writing, for me, is a lot like
musical composition. Listening to poetry, even in a language I don’t
know, can be a perfectly musical experience. The way I see it, language
is music. Often I’m not even aware of which language I’m in at the moment
of writing.

Referring to my book Uxudo, Ron Silliman writes that "language itself,
in our time certainly, must always be plural: a system of differences,
midrashim to an Ur-text that never existed but perpetually surrounds
us. Place exists, but enterely as displacement."

What does multilingual writing have in common with unilingual writing?

I think that we write in order to learn something, to discover something
about ourselves. By composing poetry we might explore our relation to
language as such, be it rooted in our personal linguistic history, in
our musical tendency, or anything else that is essential to our being.
A poet’s relation to language may be rooted in the vocabulary of her
profession. If a poet makes her living as a newspaper editor or a train
conductor or a homemaker, I can imagine that her relation to language
could be found in the vocabulary she uses every day. Why not? I’m not
suggesting that poets should necessarily write about their daily lives,
although many do it, and do it well—in fact, I will explain why it’s
inevitable to write about what is on our minds, even if indirectly—but
I think that it would make sense for any writer to use the vocabulary
she is exposed to professionally.

Are you saying that homemakers should write using the vocabulary
of daily chores?

I guess they could use the vocabulary encountered in the supermarket,
or on television, or not. That would be up to them. But it would make
sense—wouldn’t it?—to reach out to what surrounds us, both our internal
and external environment.

Is then the shopping list to be regarded as the external environment
and the personal history as the internal one?

In a way. But there is no need to worry too much about the differences
between what is seen and by whom and with what. We’re all capable of
seeing everything with our own eyes, with our unique eyes. Even when
we follow or mimic someone else’s view, we do it as only we can. By
internalizing, we assimilate the information and make it our own. We
keep our individuality, even if we don’t mean to.

And perhaps most importantly, there is this inner conversation that
takes place in our minds at all times. A kind of internal chitchat that
buzzes incessantly inside our heads. (This is the chatter we aim to
put to rest for a while when we meditate.) We are having these conversations
and commentaries and negotiations with ourselves during every waking
moment of the day, it seems, and of course when we sleep, dreams keep
going on, whether we remember them or not. This dialogue is founded
primarily in our personal history and in our relation to the outside
world, of which we are a part. This mono/dialogue then is not grounded
only in the internal self, acting as the inner voice, but is itself
an intrinsic part of the continuing construction and reconstruction
of the self, the building of what we are becoming. With every action
we are continually forming our own character, developing our personality.
And if you listen closely, you’ll notice that these incessant thoughts
are seldom syntactical and are not always in a particular language:
they can be sounds, single syllables, melodies, anything. This morning,
for example, I woke up uttering the sound "KHE!" This is the kind of
internal voice to which I refer, originating in our inner, personal
history. This is what’s really unique about each of us in any language,
and this is what’s definitely worth exploring and listening to when
making art.